of legitimate marriage with almost equal aversion. They were indignant at the servitude to which it bound them, the state of dependence and legal incapacity in which it kept them; for it left them without rights, and without the enjoyment of their own property; it reduced them to the status of mere children, or rather transferred them from the power of their parent to that of their husband. They continued through life, in spite of the mockery of respect with which the laws surrounded them, things rather than persons; things that could be sold, transferred backwards and forwards, from one master to another, for the sake of their dowry or even their powers of child-bearing. For the smallest fault the wife might be placed on trial before her husband, or if he were more than usually considerate in judging upon his own case, before a council of her relations. She might be beaten with rods, even to death itself, for adultery or any other heinous crime; while she might suffer divorce from the merest caprice, and simply for the loss of her youth or beauty.1

It was Jesus Christ who, by His authoritative teaching upon Holy Matrimony, healed the festering sore of pagan domestic life. Not only did He redress the permanent evil which had vitiated human relations, but He placed womanhood for the first time upon a level of equal dignity with manhood, and He established a new social system on the basis of permanency and indissolubility in the life of the family. If there is any lesson which history teaches, it is that marriage under the shelter of Christianity is one thing, and, where that shelter is wanting, it is another. All Christian expositors, however they may interpret Our Lord's words in the Gospels, agree in holding that He set before men's eyes the indissolubility of marriage as the goal to which they were unceasingly to aspire.

It is true, indeed, that the Church did not at once enunciate an absolute unvarying law of Christian marriage. The fathers of the Church did not always use the same language; they exhibited more or less diversity of views as to the obligations necessarily imposed upon all Christians in respect of marriage, and especially upon those Christians who had suddenly passed from the darkness of heathenism into the light of Christianity. But the points of uncertainty were few, the general principle was clear; and Christian marriage, as it is painted in all early Christian writings, is vividly contrasted in its dignity and purity with the fragile and often polluted matrimonial alliances of the heathen world. Tertullian, for example, in one of his writings, draws the picture of a Christian home-such a picture as is fully applicable to a Christian home to-day-where husband and wife are bound together by intimate ties of spiritual sympathy, where they possess all their thoughts and interests in common, where they pray together, worship together, and receive Holy Communion side by side at the Table of the Lord, where they look upon their children as immortal beings entrusted to them by 1 Merivale, History of the Romans under the Empire, ch. xxxiii.

God for constant training in view of a better and higher future life."

History shows that one factor, if not the chief, in the prevalence of Christianity within the Roman Empire was the superiority of Christian over pagan morals. Gibbon in his enumeration of the causes tending to the growth of Christianity specifies, as the fourth cause, 'the virtues of the first Christians'; and although he treats these virtues in the sceptical and scoffing manner which is characteristic of his general attitude towards Christianity, he does not practically deny or dispute them. The Church appealed to the nobler instincts of humanity, yearning for a higher than the pagan ideal of life. She promised, and the world believed that she was able to effect, an amelioration in the domestic life of the people.

But it was only natural that, as the Church spread over the Empire, and still more as the Empire came to be Christian, the Church should impose her law of marriage directly or indirectly upon society. Nor was this all; for as her law became more effective, it became more rigid and more narrow. There arose in the Church the spirit of asceticism; the state of celibacy or virginity was regarded as higher and more sacred than marriage; various restrictions were enforced upon men and women who desired to marry, as upon the clergy and upon widowers and widows among the laity; but, above all, the indissolubility of marriage, except where it was dissolved by the death of one of the parties, came to be an accepted principle of the Church.

Thus the Church not only assumed complete authority in matters of marriage and divorce, but refused to allow any dissolution of a marriage when once it had been rightly consummated. It is not necessary to trace the influence of the Church and of the Christian law of marriage upon legislation in the countries of Europe generally. What was true of England was true of other Christian countries as well; and in England, as the report of the Royal Commission justly states, Ecclesiastical Courts at an early date acquired complete jurisdiction over questions of marriage and divorce, there being an ultimate appeal from their decisions to Rome.'"

But the Church, like the State, when once the law of indissolubility in marriage was recognised as absolute, came into conflict with the exigencies of human nature. Whatever system in marriage or elsewhere opposes human nature, is bound to fall in the end. It was open to the Church to proclaim the indissolubility of all marriages, but there were always a number of married people who could not or would not live together. The

Ad Uxorem, ii. 9.

History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. xv.

P. 10.

Church, then, was driven into the admission that, if marriages once consummated could not be dissolved, they might yet be declared null and void. Ecclesiastical casuists invented a large number of grounds as justifying the nullification of marriage. If there was what was known as a pre-contract made by one of the parties to a marriage, if there was a certain spiritual affinity within liberal degrees between the two parties, if there was an absence of some formality held to be essential, then it was always possible to get a marriage annulled in an Ecclesiastical Court. Sir Lewis Dibdin, whose words are quoted in the Report of the Royal Commission, says:

These elaborate and highly artificial rules produced a system under which marriages theoretically indissoluble, if originally valid, could practically be got rid of by being declared null ab initio on account of the impediment of relationship. This relationship might consist in some remote or fanciful connection between the parties or their god-parents, unknown to either of them until the desire to find the way out of an irksome union suggested minute search into pedigrees for obstacles a search which somehow seems to have been generally successful.5

It is evident that, if marriages could be nullified upon a large variety of more or less ambiguous grounds, few marriages, however they might be contracted, would be absolutely secure. Monsignor Moyes, who gave evidence before the Royal Commission on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church, stated that that Church still recognised no fewer than fifteen different grounds for declaring a marriage to be null. So wide a liberty in the nullification of marriages may be justified or condemned; but, at all events, it is a resource to which the Church was practically driven in the Middle Ages, as being in her eyes the only possible means of remedying cases of extreme hardship, where marriage was held to be indissoluble.

The Reformation in England brought a great change in the practice, and probably also in the spirit, of the Church. The law of the State no longer recognised the old grounds of nullity. But it maintained the ecclesiastical principle of indissolubility in marriage. The result was that the law of marriage became or would have become more stringent after than it ever had been before the Reformation. It must be borne in mind that, where the Church abandons the exercise of a dispensing power in matrimonial causes, or, in other words, where marriages when once duly contracted are subject neither to dissolution nor to nullification, married persons necessarily find themselves in a position which did not exist under the ecclesiastical law of the Church before the Reformation. The evils or the hardships remain the same, but the opportunity of escape from them is lost.

The reformers, therefore, were called to face the same difficulty as had practically, if not avowedly, led the undivided Church to sanction in certain circumstances not indeed the dissolution but the nullification of marriage. They met the difficulty in more ways than one. Some of them held marriage to be dissoluble, and even to be dissoluble upon several grounds as well as upon the ground of adultery. It is well known that Luther was prepared to adopt a rather lax view of the sanctity attaching to marriage. But in England a rough-and-ready solution was gradually adopted. There is indeed reason to think that English statesmen at the Reformation contemplated the possibility of setting up an Ecclesiastical Court to grant divorces and sanction re-marriages. But no such Court came into being; and while divorce a mensa et thoro -or, as it is now called, judicial separation-remained as it had been before the Reformation a recognised part of ecclesiastical law, the only legal escape from the bond of marriage, the only divorce a vinculo, which carried with it the power of remarriage, lay in an Act of Parliament. Such an Act of Parliament, however, was at once exceptional and extravagant; it was altogether beyond the resources of the poor, it was comparatively seldom promoted even by the rich. Figures cited by the Royal Commissioners show that the number of Acts of Parliament dissolving marriages between the years 1715 and 1775 was only sixty-i.e. one Act a year.' The method of effecting judicial relief from matrimonial embarrassments by private Acts of Parliament could not and did not cure the admitted evil of unhappy marriages; it only drove the evil beneath the surface.

There are some Churchmen who have advocated the prohibition of divorce in all circumstances, as though it were their opinion that the legal indissolubility of marriage would prove a sufficient guarantee of national morality. No doubt it would be as easy, as it would be welcome, to proclaim the absolute indissolubility of marriage, if all persons who now seek divorce would then agree to treat their marriages as indissoluble. But the idea that the prohibition of divorce or its practical impossibility is a safeguard to public morals seems to display a certain ignorance of human nature and human history. Mr. Bishop, the author of a well-known treatise on Marriage, Divorce, and Separation,' gives the following description of English social life during the time when a private Act of Parliament was the only possible means of obtaining divorce:

It is well known that in England, where divorces from the bond of matrimony have till lately been attainable only on application to Parlia

' P. 11.

ment, in rare instances, and at an enormous expense, rendering them a luxury quite beyond the reach of the mass of the people, second marriages without divorce, and adulteries, and the birth of illegitimate children are of every day occurrence; while polygamy is in these circumstances winked at, though a felony on the statute book.

It was in these circumstances that in 1850 a Royal Commission was appointed to inquire into the present state of the law of divorce in this country, and more particularly into the mode of obtaining a divorce a vinculo matrimonii in this country.' The wonder is not that such a Commission was appointed in 1850, but that it had not been appointed long before. During three centuries the country had tolerated the evils arising from the legal impossibility of either nullifying or dissolving marriages, except by Act of Parliament.

It is important to notice that the Royal Commission of 1850 was strictly limited in its scope. It was not empowered to consider the practicability or the desirability of divorce generally. By the terms of its appointment it was confined to the question, What would be the best procedure for granting a divorce a vinculo, where one of the parties to a marriage was legally entitled to seek such a divorce? Lord Campbell, who had been the Chairman of the Commission, speaking in the House of Lords on the 19th of May 1857, declared expressly that 'the object of the Commissioners was not to alter the law, but the procedure by which the law was carried into effect.'"

The Royal Commission appointed in 1850 issued its report in 1853. The outcome of that report was the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Bill of 1857. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Cranworth, in moving the second reading of the Bill in the House of Lords, was as clear as Lord Campbell in describing what he held to be its proper scope or nature. He refused, as the Government of which he was a member refused in both Houses, to enter upon a general consideration of marriage and divorce:

The main object of this Bill was [he said] to constitute a Court which should be competent to decree as a matter of right that relief in favour of persons who had just matter of complaint which could now only be obtained by an Act of Parliament. 10

He assured the House that:

nothing would induce him to submit a Bill which he believed would have the slightest tendency to shake the confidence of the country in the permanency, if not the absolute indissolubility, of the marriage tie.11

It is not necessary to discuss the interesting debates in both Houses of Parliament upon Lord Cranworth's Bill. Mr. Glad• Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, vol. cxlv. p. 512. 10 Ibid. p. 488. 11 Ibid. p. 483.

Vol. i. sec. 51.